Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Simon Gunning: The Sweet Sight of Light, a major exhibition of new oil paintings, mixed-media works, and drawings on paper by Australian-born Louisiana master artist Simon Gunning. Opening on Saturday, October 03, 2026, from 6 PM – 8 PM in conjunction with Art for Arts’ Sake, the exhibition reflects a personal and artistic evolution for Gunning, celebrated for over four decades as one of the Gulf South’s premier visual chroniclers.
Created in the wake of recent health incidents and scares, this body of work serves as a triumphant declaration of gratitude and vital presence. In The Sweet Sight of Light, Gunning embraces a palette visibly brighter, more luminous, and radiant than in previous exhibitions. The canvases radiate with a heightened appreciation for the ephemeral beauty of the natural world and the quiet gift of daily existence—capturing the exact instant when light transforms the ordinary into the transcendent.
At the center of the exhibition is its title work, The Sweet Sight of Light (2023–24). Spanning ten feet across (60 x 144 inches), this monumental oil on canvas stands as one of the largest and most ambitious compositions Gunning has ever completed. The show also gathers Gunning’s classic themes, presenting iconic subjects that have defined his career: industrial tugboats navigating local waterways (Yellow Tug #4), working trawlers (Trawlers, Harvey Canal #2), brooding cypress swamps (Into the Deep, Crossing the Saline #2), and native marsh birds (The Rookery Early Spring, Cattle Egret, Grand Bayou).
In addition to his signature oil canvases, Gunning introduces a fresh and striking series of works on paper: Japanese Pigma Micron pen drawings of market fish arranged on ice and newspaper. Inspired by recent travels to Japan and Australia, these intricately detailed studies—including Yellow Tails, Fish Market Kanazawa Japan, Garfish on Ice, Sydney Fish Markets, Blue Swimmers Lake Pontchartrain on Newspaper, and Crabs with Lemon on Newspaper—combine global culinary traditions with local South Louisiana seafood, highlighting Gunning's exceptional draftsmanship and eye for texture.
About the Artist
Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1956, Simon Gunning studied painting and drawing at the National Gallery School of Art and the Victorian College of Art in Melbourne from 1976 to 1978 before making New Orleans his home in 1981. A resident of the city's Bywater neighborhood for over 40 years, Gunning has earned widespread acclaim for his intricate, un-sentimentalized depictions of Southern Louisiana’s waterways, swamps, and urban landscapes.
Gunning was awarded a Visual Artist Fellowship by the Louisiana Division of the Arts in 1999 and served as the Donna Perret Rosen Artist-in-Residence at Isidore Newman School in 2009. In 2016–2017, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art hosted a major retrospective exhibition and published an accompanying monograph, Simon Gunning and the Southern Louisiana Landscape. His work is preserved in prominent public and corporate collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Percent for Art Collection at Louis Armstrong International Airport, Microsoft Corporation, Saks Fifth Avenue, Iberia Bank, and Whitney National Bank.
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